Speaking at the Burgher Association annual meeting in Colombo Chilcott said that successive governments in Colombo after independence introduced measures designed to discriminate in favour of Sinhala speakers and against the minority communities.

“If my fairy godmother were to grant me the power to change one thing in Sri Lanka’s recent past it would be to prevent the Sinhala-only language law from coming into force and to make English the common working language,” he said.

Stressing on the importance of English, the High Commissioner said that in the last 50 years it has become even more important than before for Sri Lankans to speak, read and write good English. “English is the gateway to the world of ideas outside Sri Lanka,” he said.

High Commissioner admitted that the colonial British administrations favored the Tamils and Burghers over the Sinhalese people as an unintended effect of the meritocratic system applied by the British.

“It is true that the Burghers and the Tamils got more senior government service jobs in proportion to their overall populations than the Sinhalese did,” Chilcott noted.

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